The random (and I do mean random) musings of a foreign language professor that range from mundane to shocking, cloying to cold and distant, contented to disgruntled... (N.B. Posts may appear in English, Spanish, French, Welsh, Cornish, Breton or any combination thereof. Other languages may also appear from time to time)

dimarts, d’agost 22, 2006

Ah, the good old days... [No, this isn't what you think, read it anyway] (English)

Hey, can you remember the good old days of the internet, back when only a few of us had it, and nearly 100% were able to think, drink coffee and look at the endless bytes of free porn. You remember when that porn used to come down off the net and have to be compiled or else in stead of a pic of a bodacious bubble butt all you would see was a soup of code? Those were the days, and I'm not just talking about getting free porn (those days are pretty much over with, unless you want a computer full of spyware and malware and other shit licking things like that. These days everyone has access, or at least it seems too many people do. Gone are the days when the net was dominated by intelligent, if periodically somewhat socially awkward men. I miss those days.

Now the net has gone proletariat. Anyone with the scratch to get a Dell and a phoneline can be online, from the privacy of his or her own home. The results are things like this email I received tonight from a friend in Mexico City; someone he knew forwarded it to him. I've snipped the addresses, but fear not, they all look very American...

"THE BEST PLAN AS YETBush wants us to cut the amount of gas we use. The best way to stop using so much gas is to deport 11 million illegal immigrants! That would be 11 million less people using our gas. The price of gas would?come down. If you think this is a good solution to both the problems,?forward it to your friends. I just did."

Wow, this piece of drivel would be from a person who simply can't think, never mind think, drink coffee and masturbate.

Honestly the author of said email doesn't even have a nodding acquaintance with a clue. The population of the US is more or less 290 million (actually larger, but I will stick to nice round numbers to illustrate my point) Let's round the number of illegals down to 10 million. 290 million and 10 million make 300 million. The part of that number that would be illegals, 10 million, gives us around 3%. So, let's review: this numbnut's idea is to spend billions of dollars (and burn millions of gallons of gas) rounding up and deporting (no doubt Final Solution Style with interment camps and freight trains full of wailing mothers and their sprogs and old people) 10 million human beings all to save about 6 cents a gallon on gas, or about a $1.80 a week, just about enough to buy a Grande coffee of the Day at Starbucks.

In stead of going Fascist (and oh irony of ironies, it is the Conservatives of our great nation who generally support amnesty...) how about this? Yes, it's true, we're running out of oil. No one in his or her right mind would believe that crude oil just squirts out of the earth in a never ending load of jet-black jism. If that were true, then the Earth would be flat and I would be hung like a Breton stallion. I'm willing to believe the scientific community, and I can publicly admit that I am not hung like a Breton stallion. The oil is drying up.

However, we still have decades left to suck the rest out of the ground. Humanity has recently brought the hapless Republic of Chad into the limelight by exploiting oil fields in its southern prefectures. Surely there are even more untapped fields to be exploited. The problem at present is not that there isn't enough oil for today, but that it's not being extracted and refined, a couple weekends ago I was in Philadelphia and I rode by an oil refinery that appeared to be dormant. Dormant refineries cannot produce gasoline. Pipelines that are dry cannot bring oil to refineries that might just be functioning...

Still beyond all that, the United States is a vast country with a lot of arable land. Why not take the Brazilian and Cuban route to self sufficiency and begin moving to ethanol? (I won't even bother getting into that topic on his blog, google it variously and presently for more information)

No, no, no, according this oik, and so many like him, the answer is easy, and of course, it's not related to the actual problem at all.

You know, when you have this great pink elephant with a case of the skidders in your living room, even though you're covered in great gobs of sticky, ripe fecal matter, it's still easier to address the problem of door knob that slips. I mean, if you can fix that little problem, the real one will just walk through the door, won't it?

One more power I wish I had: the revoke internet privileges for the truly moronic...

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Dades personals

I'm a 39 year old college professor who teaches foreign language, linguistics and world literature in a small community college in Upstate New York. I have a special interest in Celtic languages and cultures. While the content of this blog in English, in addition, I'm happy to receive comments and reply in Welsh, French, Spanish and German.